Chapter 51
CHAPTER FIFTY-ONE
When I woke up, I was freezing. There was something wet near my ear. My hands groped the ground and returned only fistfuls of dirt. The first rays of sunlight peeked out of the sky.
Had I been out here all night?
Vern.
I looked around for my flashlight, wincing at the pain in my leg, but it was nowhere to be found.
What if Vern had gotten worse? What if his heart couldn’t take the Magic? What if a million things and here I was, too far away to do anything about it. I didn’t even have the objects I needed for the spell.
I scrambled to stand, tentatively testing my weight on what I realized was a sprained ankle. That’s when I stepped back and stifled a scream.
Crouched a few yards ahead of me, digging through my pack, was a man.
I scrambled for my phone. Mercifully, it hadn’t fallen out of my pocket when I fell. Turn on, come on, turn on. I bit my lip hard.
I wanted to scream. No service.
My objects were in that bag, so that put Magic out of the question. I dug around in my pocket for something—anything to defend myself.
I gripped my keys hard between my two fingers, ready to jab for his throat or sternum. I waited for him to turn around and steadied my voice, praying with everything I had that it sounded braver than I felt.
“My friends know where I am.”
The man laughed. “Yeah, and you’re goddamn lucky, too. I had to pinpoint your last location from your phone.” He turned around, and my shoulders sagged with relief. “What were you thinking, Cel?”
“Jesus, Max! You scared me half to death.”
“I scared you? What gave you the bright idea of going down into a ravine in the middle of the night? I thought you were dead.”
I held my stomach. My head swam, my ankle ached, and I tasted bile on my tongue. “I thought if I could find her third object, I could do the spell on my own, in case you …”
He looked down. “I was always going to come back. I just had to take care of a few things, in case we were going to … well, you know.”
“In case we died, you mean.” We both winced. That was me. Always so eloquent.
“Yeah.” The silence stretched taut around us. He ran his fingers through his hair, quickly. “Well, did you at least find anything?”
“No.” I looked around, but everything looked so much different in the daylight. I realized this wasn’t the place at all that we’d seen the people chanting. I sighed, shoulders tugging down. “I didn’t even make it back to the place where we were.”
“Think again,” he said, pointing to the shelf of rock above us, a short distance from where I’d climbed down. “That’s the rock we hid behind the other day.”
He bent down to study the dirt, and my eyes widened.
Hidden in the outcropping of rock, barely visible except for its movement in the stiff breeze, was a rope ladder. It was on the other side of the rock face, across from where I’d climbed down. If it had been daylight, I might have even seen it while I was climbing.
My eyes followed the line of the ladder and stopped at the mouth of a small cave. It was nearly hidden from three sides, the perfect cover for doing something you didn’t want other people to see.
Max chuckled, clapping me on the back. “Shall we?” He offered me his hand, and I frowned. My hand wasn’t bloody anymore.
“I wrapped it to stop the bleeding,” he explained, “but you’re going to need stitches when we get back.”
“Thank you,” I said, leaning on his forearm to take some of the weight off my ankle. I held my breath at the precipice of the cave, a cool draft of air drifting past the opening.
The walls of the cave sloped to a dark dome, and the floor was damp.
On the ground were white quilts and towels I recognized from the dorms. Candles had been mounted along the wall.
A table in the center had been draped in loose black fabric.
There was a tattered black cloak in the corner, along with other personal effects: loose sheets of paper, women’s clothing, mismatched shoes, a hair comb, and a tarnished ring with a small red gemstone.
The brothers had clearly been using this place for some time.
“They were down here, that’s for sure,” Max said.
I picked up a white Converse and one red heel. One was size seven and the other size nine. “These things belong to more than one girl.”
The ring was, without a doubt, an object, though I wasn’t sure whose. I could hear the faintest of murmurs from it, only a glimmer, indicating that Magic had once passed through here, but no more. This was the object of someone who was now dead. “This is where they did it.”
I kept walking, keeping an eye out for anything that looked like it belonged to Aaron, too, and ended up kicking something with the toe of my shoe.
A bone, like the others back on campus. This one was thin, spindly, only about the size of my forearm, and cracked at one end.
It had been beside a bowl with some foul-smelling liquid inside.
I sniffed the bowl once, then backed away. “The bone must have been wiped down with the bleach.” I turned the bone in my hands. “But why would they bleach a cow’s—?”
I dropped the bone with a clatter, feeling bile rising to the back of my throat. “Oh.”
Max’s mouth twisted. “My guess, the shin.”
I swallowed, fighting against waves of nausea. Quietly, I said, “If this is here, then where’s the rest?”
As we searched, I half-prayed we wouldn’t find anything.
I’d hoped they’d just robbed a grave. Anything other than killed someone.
But then Max called to me from outside the cave, his voice low.
“We should get out of here,” he said, trying to direct me away from the drop, a shallow shelf of rock just large enough for a body, but I saw it.
The glimpse of hair was enough. The bile in my stomach turned acidic, and I threw up against the wall.
He rubbed my back in small circles. “We’ve got to get out of here and let the school know.”
I was terrified. All I wanted was to do what he said, to race back to campus and tell the council, and have all the brothers arrested. But that would still leave Dani, Luce, and Vern without our help. “I’m not leaving without Dani’s object.”
I turned back to the cave. If it was anywhere, it had to be here.
I walked toward the women’s clothing and other items, which I realized now likely belonged to the girl at the bottom of the ravine. Someone had written their initials on the inside of a sweatshirt. EG.
“Emma Garcia.” My heart sank.
“Those fucking bastards,” Max said.
I picked up the small comb. Small pearls decorated the top, yellowing with age. The handle was mother-of-pearl. “This one’s different.” I ran a hand over it lovingly. It felt familiar to me somehow, and like something I should protect, should treasure. It was Dani’s, I just knew it.
“A gift from Dani’s mother, maybe? Or an aunt?” It had the same faint flicker as the telescope. Reticent, removed, but this one was so full of warmth, too. “A family heirloom, I think,” I said.
But Max wasn’t as excited about my discovery. He looked like he was about to retch. “Let’s grab it and get out of here.”
I nodded. I gathered the other objects, too—the ring and the notebook and even the shoes—and stowed them in my backpack.
There was no power in them anymore, but these things were important to the girl out there once.
Mementos of a life, things that linked her to the people she loved and the people who loved her.
It seemed wrong that they should be out here all alone, that she should be out here all alone.
When they came back for Emma’s body, I would give them to her family.
As we walked back, me limping and leaning heavily on Max for support, I noticed he was wearing a different hat. A black one with silver braiding. “Why the change in attire?”
“I figure I’ll save them the trouble of dressing me for the funeral.”
“How considerate of you.” My laugh rang hollow. We both knew there was more truth to the statement than we liked.
We reached the other side of campus in a cool ten minutes.
When we walked up to the door of Maritza’s cottage, Max grabbed my hand, his thumb tracing down my palm like he used to.
“Last chance to run,” he said, his dimple just poking out of a sad half-smile.
“We could hitch a ride to Mexico. Me, you, and Bear. Unless you’d rather go it alone again. ”
The smell of dried red chiles hanging from the porch wafted under my nose.
I squeezed his hand. “No, and no.”
He looked in my eyes for one long moment. “Well, if I die …” He faltered, seeming to want to say something, then shook his head.
“We won’t,” I said.
I took a deep breath and walked up to the cottage, tying back the Wall with a hairband. “Ready?”
“As I’ll ever be.”
We stepped inside.